Taking responsibility for universities and their students

by Fergus Brady

Every year, mid-September sees students heading or returning to universities across the country, looking forward to the challenges and opportunities of the academic year ahead. University societies will be thinking about their programmes for the year ahead; the events they want to promote and the speakers they want to host. Unfortunately, the past decade has seen many universities playing host to deeply divisive and rancorous extremist speakers, often at the request of the university’s Islamic society.

This trend was thrust into the national spotlight following the failure of UmarFaroukAbdulmutallab to detonate an explosive device on board a Northwest Airlines Flight over Detroit. Abdulmutallab had served as President of University College London’s Islamic Society, during which time the society had hosted numerous extremist speakers. Abdulmutallab wasn’t the first senior member of a British ISOC to engage in terrorist activity however.

In 2007, Kafeel Ahmed, who had been involved with the executive of Queen’s University Belfast ISOC, died, having driven a jeep packed with explosive material into the front entrance of Glasgow airport. In the same year, YassinNassari, the president of the University of Westminster Harrow Campus ISOC was arrested at Luton airport, when security staff found blueprints for military rockets in his luggage. WaheedZaman, who had been president of the London Metropolitan University ISOC, was imprisoned in 2008 for his part in the plot to explode liquid bombs on transatlantic flights.

All of this was brought into wider national awareness following Abdulmutallab’s arrest. The failed terrorist’s time at UCL was widely discussed in the British press, as was the suggestion that he may have been radicalised at university. The attention given to this case, and the consequent discussions of universities’ attitude to extremist speakers means that no university can plead ignorance on this issue. In the absence of ignorance, the presence of divisive speakers on campus must be the result of complacency or complicity on the part of the university authorities.

When challenged on UCL’s inglorious record of hosting extremist speakers, Malcolm Grant, the university’s provost, made his attitude towards the issue clear by stating that he had no objections to extremist speakers and that all voices deserved to be heard in the interest of free speech. Organisations such as Student Rights can bring unsavoury events to the attention of unaware university administrators but there are few solutions to craven abdications of responsibility, such as that demonstrated by Professor Grant. Given the new prominence of this issue on university campuses, it would be desirable if the relevant authorities developed responsible plans to keep their campuses free of the kind of rhetoric that, as the terrorism cases mentioned above prove, can have repercussions far beyond the university campus.

On 5 March 2018, the King’s College Libertarian Society attempted to host an event featuring Israeli speaker Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and controversial YouTube vlogger ‘Sargon of Akkad’ (Carl Benjamin). Both speakers were due to talk about freedom of expression as well as ‘objectivism’, the libertarian philosophy created by Russian-American author Ayn Rand. The protest group set up on Facebook called for the speakers to be no-platformed and described them as ‘white supremacists’, ‘neo-fascists’, ‘nazis’ and ‘alt-right’. Off-campus groups, including black-clad activists from the hardline “left-wing, anti-fascist” street movement Antifa, were also present. Unlike the student societies, Antifa violently shut down the event and forced it to be cancelled. The organisers of the event faced other institutional obstacles. The appalling scenes at KCL last night are evidence of an encroaching culture of intolerance and hostility towards free speech on university campuses in Britain.

On Monday 12 February, former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Likud Party politician Dan Meridor gave a speech entitled ‘Threats and Challenges’ to students at the Strand Campus of King’s College London (KCL). This event, which was jointly organised by The Pinsker Centre and the KCL and City University Israel Societies, was met with vocal protests by students and activists affiliated to anti-Israel groups. Video footage shows how a crowd of around sixty protestors waved placards and sought to disrupt the event by screaming loudly outside the entrance to the lecture room where Meridor was speaking. Some protestors were reported to have photographed members of the audience leaving the room. The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) condemned what it called “disgraceful scenes”, and the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews claimed that he would be in contact with the Principal of KCL to “gain assurances that there will be no repeat”. We hope that KCL can fully ensure that future speakers, Israeli or otherwise, are not subject to similar attempts at disruption in future, nor their audience subject to unacceptable levels of hostility and intimidation.

In the lead up to Holocaust Memorial Day 2018, the UK government has announced that it will partner with the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) and the Holocaust Education Trust (HET) in sending 200 university students from across the UK to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former Nazi extermination camp in Poland. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department for Education have pledged to devote £144,000 to the project. They aim to train participants so that they can educate fellow students about anti-Semitism when they return to UK campuses. Student Rights is extremely supportive of the government’s decision to support students in this way. We hope it has a tangible impact at all levels of student life across the UK.